Dan Snow - Death or Victory - The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire

As the battered fleet entered the bay at Halifax on 30 April Wolfe’s frustration turned into rage. There sitting at anchor was Durell’s North American squadron which should by now have been blockading the St Lawrence. The seamen of the fleet would have noticed immediately that Durell’s ships were riding at just one anchor and were therefore clearly ready to sail on the first fair breeze but the landsman Wolfe was livid. To his political superiors in London he was measured but to Major General Jeffrey Amherst, the senior British commander in North America, he wrote that, having arrived in ‘tolerable good order, the length of our passage considered’, he was ‘astounded to find Mr Durell at anchor’. 35This was positively diplomatic compared to comments recorded in a remarkable and recently discovered private journal written by one of Wolfe’s close ring of aides. This straight-talking account, the so-called ‘Family Journal’, is more outspoken in its condemnation of Durell and his late departure from Halifax: ‘Nothing could astonish Wolfe more than on our arrival at Halifax’ to discover Durell riding at anchor, and ‘nothing could be more scandalous than their proceedings’ when ‘all the bellowing of the troops at Halifax could not persuade them to leave that harbour for fear of the ice’. The diarist writes that Wolfe, who ‘knew the navy well’, had feared since leaving Britain that they would be late to leave thanks to ‘an aversion to run the hazards of the river’. He went on to say that ‘much time, according to custom was spent in deliberation, and at length they determined that it would be more agreeable to sail up the river when the spring was well advanced than during so cold a season’. The ‘Family Journal’ makes it clear that Wolfe believed this was a setback of the most serious kind: had they got into the river when they were supposed to have done ‘supplies [would have] been intercepted’ and ‘the enemy would not have been able to fire a gun’. In short, concludes the journal, ‘Canada would certainly have been an easy conquest, had that squadron gone early enough into the river.’ 36

Saunders, for whom sadly little personal correspondence exists, was kinder to his subordinate, writing to London on 2 May that he found Durell ‘unmoored, and ready to sail…He waits only for a wind, and, I hope, will sail tomorrow.’ 37He did sail on 3 May but ‘the wind proved contrary’ and ‘they were obliged to anchor’ just outside the harbour until 5 May. 38As a result Durell entered the St Lawrence just days after the precious convoy from France. Wolfe would never forgive his naval colleagues for this failure. It was the first crack in a relationship upon which combined operations depended and the resultant schism was almost as detrimental to the British cause as the arrival of succour to his enemies.

The hysteria of Wolfe’s circle is perhaps attributable to the slow realization of the scale of the challenge and the paucity of their resources. Troop ships from New York trickled in slowly. The first to arrive was the Ruby , on 1 May, carrying ordnance, gunpowder, and shot. She told of storms, dismastings, and delays afflicting the rest of the fleet. 39As the other ships did start to arrive it soon became clear that they were carrying numbers of men who were consistently below what Wolfe had been expecting. In Britain, he had been promised battle-hardened regiments of the British army in North America; however, nobody had considered that winter would leave these units decimated. Three thousand reinforcements were supposed to have been sent out from Britain, a mix of new recruits and soldiers drafted in from other regiments. 40However, these men had been diverted to bolster a bogged-down campaign in the French-owned Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Vague promises were made to transfer these men back up to Wolfe’s army after they had conquered the islands, but these assurances must have rung hollow to Wolfe. It was a fact that service in the Caribbean ruined any unit sent there. Microbes broke armies in the Indies more surely than enemy steel. From 1740 to 1742 a British and colonial American army outside the walls of Cartagena had lost 10,000 of its 14,000 men, about one in ten of them as a result of enemy action, the rest from disease. Wolfe, as a boy soldier, had been earmarked for the expedition but had been saved from an almost certain death by a delicate constitution that was so overwhelmed by the germs of Portsmouth that he was sent home to recuperate with his mother. The Spanish boasted that disease provided a surer defence than ships, forts, and men. They morbidly celebrated yellow fever, as fiebre patriótica , ‘patriotic fever’, because it attacked outsiders with such jingoistic fervour. 41Criminals were granted a reprieve from the death penalty in Britain if they agreed to serve in the tropics. Soldiers were often given the choice when being punished for a grave offence: 1,000 lashes or service in the Caribbean; they usually chose the former. 42

Wolfe would have known it would be a miracle if the troops arrived back in the North Atlantic in time to be of any use even if they were not eviscerated by disease. He would have to make do with the regiments already in theatre. At least every regiment had seen action. British regular soldiers had been fighting in North America since 1755. Each summer’s fighting had been on a larger scale than the year before. Early in the war the men had been so raw that many of them had been taught how to use muskets on decks of transports by officers who had learnt their trade through reading manuals. Now every unit had served through at least one operation and had survived one tough winter. On the downside the campaigns and climate had exerted a powerful attritional effect. Men had used the dispersal to billets over the winter as an opportunity to desert and disappear along the vast and unregulated frontier. Disease could be just as bad among the snow as it was in the tropics. The absence of fresh fruit and vegetables over the winter meant that men lacked vitamin C and scurvy was a constant threat. The year before Wolfe had written at the start of the campaigning season that ‘some of the regiments of this army have 3 or 400 men eaten up with scurvy’. 43This terrible disease appeared first as liver spots on the skin and then quickly led to spongy gums and haemorrhaging from all mucous membranes. Sufferers became listless and immobilized and the advanced stages saw the loss of teeth and suppurating wounds. It is famously associated with long sea journeys, but such was the isolation of garrisons in the backcountry during the winter, that it was just as common along the frontier.

Wolfe wrote a barrage of letters to superiors in London and New York, describing the condition of the four battalions that had spent the winter in Halifax. They were ‘in good order’, but ‘are at a very low ebb’. Measles had recently ‘got amongst them’, and they would have suffered far worse had it not been for the ‘more than common care of the officers that command them’. Their officers had attempted to obtain fresh provisions where possible, maintain good hospitals, and lay on plenty of the local anti-scorbutic, ‘spruce beer’, a mildly alcoholic drink brewed from molasses and spruce tips and a good source of vitamin C. These precautions, combined with strict discipline, had ‘preserved these battalions from utter ruin’, without them, ‘these regiments would have been utterly annihilated’. Even so, Wolfe warned that their numbers were still well below expectations. Many of the battalions at Halifax numbered around five hundred men each, just over half their ideal complement. Wolfe feared that the two battalions left further north in Louisbourg, cut off from the outside world over the winter, were ‘in a worse condition’. He stated glumly that ‘the number of regular forces can hardly exceed the half’ of 12,000 that London had promised him during the planning phase. Any losses during the sail up the St Lawrence or a bad outbreak of disease during the campaign would result in ‘some difficulties’, and Wolfe was convinced that the risky nature of this amphibious assault meant that they were ‘very liable to accidents’. He would fight this campaign with no reserve, no margin for error. However, he told his superiors in London, ‘our troops, indeed, are good and very well disposed. If valour can make amends for want of numbers, we shall probably succeed.’ 44